The Public Editor

What to Do When News Grows Old Before Its Time

By JACK ROSENTHAL

Published: August 8, 2004

DAN OKRENT, an outsider to The Times, has brought energetic reporting and insight to readers' concerns about how the paper covers events in the news. My perspective as an insider draws me to a broader topic: news, period.

Our generation is witnessing a relentless rise in the number of news outlets, the frequency of news reports and the media's clamor for every scrap of new information, consequential or not. In this all-news all-the-time environment, society is immersed first in a flood of facts and then in a rush of opinion. Inescapably, the public's interest is soon saturated. Too soon.

Not many years ago, news came but twice a day. There were two news cycles, one for A.M.'s, morning papers delivered to your door, and one for P.M.'s, for afternoon papers on the newsstands and the evening TV news. Then, in 1961, a radio pioneer named Gordon McLendon, aiming for the Los Angeles market, turned XETRA in Tijuana into the first all-news station. In 1965, WINS in New York adopted and enlarged the format, becoming one of the most listened-to stations in America.

In 1980, Ted Turner brought America's eyes into the picture with CNN, all-news cable television. TV kept evolving with the arrival of Fox as a fourth network, more cable networks and satellites that enabled local stations to report from distant places. In the mid-70's, there were 617 members of the Senate's TV and radio press gallery. Today, there are 3,031.

So much for the quaint concept of two news cycles. Now, in the electronic era, there's just one, instant and constant. Continuous News is what The Times calls the department that serves The Times on the Web. And the cable networks, not content with reporting just one subject at a time, send headlines crawling over and over across the bottom of the screen. The meatloaf, once cut in half each day for A.M.'s and P.M.'s, is now sliced so thin that mere morsels are flaunted as Exclusive Reports!

"The wires" were for decades a staple of every newsroom - the teletype machines that clacked out A.P. and U.P.I. reports from around the world. Now, clack has yielded to click. Every computer user can call up unlimited news - real and rumored - without any media go-between. When the 9/11 commission posted its report online last month, the Web site quickly experienced 8 million hits and 2.7 million downloads of some or all of the 567-page report.

The combination of all these new sources of news has had a pronounced, interlocking effect on newsmakers, the media and the public.

Consider, for instance, the phenomenon of news leaks. They used to be surreptitious. In 1967, when The Washington Post reported that he was about to nominate Fred M. Vinson Jr. to a federal appeals court, President Johnson angrily canceled the nomination. Today, leaking is officially sanctioned. Indeed, major stories are hardly taken seriously unless they are leaked days in advance.

Leaks can be trial balloons. Newsmakers can play on the hunger of the media herd by doling out bits of a story, turning one into four or five days of headlines. With so many reporters clamoring for news, sources can orchestrate the release of information ever more to their advantage.

Consider also the acceleration of news reporting. In the 1992 campaign, the Clinton forces devised what has become a staple of modern political practice, the War Room, where every charge or claim of the opposition is heard and answered immediately. Now, the Bush campaign includes a 24-hour operation with a core staff of eight, plus interns, that starts work each day at 5 a.m.

The ever increasing need for speed creates other secondary effects. As recently as the 1992 conventions, the nominees would make their big speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, and the Times editorial page would respond with quick comments the next morning. But the editors would gradually develop more considered views for the prized platform of the week, the lead editorial on Sunday. Today, any such delay is inconceivable. By Sunday, the subject is tattered and torn.

It is even necessary on occasion to editorialize ahead of the news. Last month, so much was already known about the 9/11 commission report that The Times editorialized about it hours before it was released. Had the editors waited even a day, their views would have been swamped by the torrent of commentary in other media.

Much more news and much faster news: it has created a kind of widespread attention deficit disorder. When news events cycled in and out of the spotlight more slowly, they stayed in the public mind longer. People could pay attention until issues of moment were resolved. Now, we are surrounded by news - on the TV at the gym, on the AOL home page, on the car radio on the way to work. To pass through Times Square is to be enveloped by no fewer than four electronic zippers flashing headlines day and night.

With such saturation coverage, news gets used up faster, decaying rapidly into what Russell Baker calls "the olds.'' Public curiosity, let alone the public interest, is exhausted, and the mass media are quick to look for some new sensation even if that means leaving important issues unresolved. News grows old before its time.